Wavelet Transform and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average Combination Approach in Crude Oil Prices Forecasting

Abstract

This paper proposes a time series forecasting approach combining wavelet transform and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) to enhance the precision in forecasting crude oil spot prices series. Wavelet transform splits the original prices series into several subseries, then the most appropriate model of ARIMA is established to predict each respective series and finally all series are combined back to get the original series. The datasets for the experiment consist of crude oil spot prices from Brent North Sea (Brent) and West Texas Intermediate (WTI). Single forecasting model ARIMA and several existing forecasting approaches in the literatures are used to measure the performance of the proposed approach by utilizing the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) collected. Final results have depicted that the proposed approach outperforms other approaches with smaller MAE and RMSE values. Ultimately, it is proven that data decomposition, combined with forecasting method can increase the accuracy in time series forecasting.